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“Any idea where we are now?” Krysty asked.
J.B. lowered his glasses. “Middle of nowhere’d be my guess.”
Ryan climbed up and out of the hole in the ground and onto the field. He immediately turned back to help lift out the others. In minutes they were all standing on firm ground.
“Close it up,” the one-eyed man ordered, putting a hand under the edge of one of the doors. With J.B.’s help, he lifted the door and let it fall. He hadn’t intended for it to make such a loud noise as it closed, but without anyone on the landing to ease the door into place, the noise couldn’t be helped. Jak and Doc lifted the second door and let it down on top of the first. It closed with a slightly smaller bang, but still one loud enough to attract attention.
With the doors closed, the exit to the gateway was nearly invisible. The ground was disturbed slightly, but after a few sweeps of their feet and hands, there was no evidence of anything unusual lying just beneath the surface of the field.
“Well, it’s definitely one-way,” J.B. said.
“Mebbe for escape,” Jak offered.
An escape hatch was definitely a possibility. That seemed to fit with the sparseness of the installation’s construction and outfitting. Anyone coming through this gateway was on a one-way trip, but why would such an installation be needed, and why here? Both questions, like all the others, Ryan knew, would be answered in time.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc thundered.
Ryan turned in time to see Doc’s feet being pulled out from under him by a strange mutie that had apparently crawled through the grass toward them. It was crouched low to the ground and seemed to move on all fours, like a spider. It was gnawing on Doc’s leg, trying to tear away the material of his pants in order to get at the pale white flesh that lay beneath.
Before the other members of the group could raise their weapons, Ryan had leveled his blaster and squeezed off a single shot that caught the mutie in the shoulder. The impact of the blast rolled the mutie away from Doc’s leg. As the one-eyed man prepared to get off a second shot at the mutie’s skull, a blaster roared on his right.
A neat black hole appeared in the middle of the mutant’s forehead, and a baseball-sized mass of gray matter and gore exploded out the back of the creature’s skull, taking its miserable life along with it.
Ryan turned and saw Mildred lower her blaster.
A little embarrassed by being taken unawares, Doc got to his feet, unsheathed his sword and was about to run the mutie through when Jak’s voice stopped him.
“More.”
Ryan looked across the field toward the nearby stand of trees and could see that there were at least half a dozen more of the hungry muties ambling toward them. They were all bone thin, filthy dirty and naked except for a flap of material around their midsections. They moved low to the ground, like spiders, hidden by the grass, but betrayed by it as their bodies pushed the tall grass under and left a trail across the field that any scout could follow.
“Hold your fire!” Ryan ordered. He had his blaster leveled, but he wasn’t sure that the muties were going to try what the first one had. And as he watched, his instincts turned out to be right. Instead of attacking the members of the group, the half-dozen muties crawled up to their dead brother and immediately set into its body with their teeth and hands. In minutes they were feeding wildly on the carcass, ripping into its flesh and muscles with all the savagery of a pack of starving wolves.
“Cannies,” Ryan muttered.
“And crazed ones to boot,” Mildred offered.
“Looks like they’ll be busy for a while,” Ryan said.
“So which way do we go?” J.B. asked.
“Feel anything, lover?” Ryan asked Krysty.
The fiery-headed woman closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment, trying to see if she could sense any nearby danger. “Can’t feel anything at all.”
“Okay, then, let’s head up that rise to get the lay of the land. I’ll take point, then Krysty, Jak, Dean, Doc and Mildred. J.B., you cover the rear. Okay, people, let’s go.”
Chapter Two
There was fear in her eyes, and Baron Franz Fox liked it. She was terrified of him, afraid of what he might do to her or what he might give others permission to do to her.
“It’s been five months since your last,” Baron Fox said softly. It was a statement, but both the baron and the woman knew it was intended more as a question. He placed his hands together, the fingertips pressing against each other. “Well, I’m waiting.”
The woman was in her early forties. She was heavy-set, especially in her hips, and her breasts sagged, which was to be expected after giving birth to five children in the past forty-eight months. She was dressed in a thin white T-shirt that left her big dark nipples clearly visible through the worn cotton fabric. She also wore a pair of old denim shorts and pair of fairly new black Western boots, her reward for delivering a set of twins a couple of terms back. The outfit would have looked good on a woman half her age, but as it was, the clothes looked a lot like the woman wearing them—old, tired and worn-out.
“I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said, her voice a little breathless and tinged with fear. “I’ve been rutting almost every night.”
“With who?” the baron asked, walking the length of his office before turning to pace back across the same track of plush red shag. His burgundy bedroom slippers had worn a path in the carpet from years of pacing. When she didn’t answer his question, he came to a stop in front of her and put a hand under her chin. He lifted her head up so that she would have to look him in the eyes when she answered the question. “With who?”
“Jon,” she replied. “Jonathan Wyndam.”
“The entire time?”
She tried to nod, but the baron held her head firmly in place.
“Has he sired with anyone else in the past five months?” Fox asked his number-one man, Norman Bauer, who was standing quietly off to the side, observing. Bauer was an accountant by trade, and his ability to handle numbers and other statistics had made him invaluable in the successful operation of Fox Farm.
Bauer opened his ledger, leafed back and forth until he came to the page listing Jonathan Wyndam’s breeding history. “According to the ledger,” Bauer said, “Wyndam’s sired fifteen in the past two years—all norms—but none in the past five months. Either Wyndam has gone sterile, or the bitch is barren.”
In a flash, Fox pulled the riding crop from a specially designed pocket of his bathrobe and slashed the kneeling woman across the face. “You bitch!” he screamed. “When you knew you weren’t conceiving, why didn’t you turn Wyndam back to stud?”
An angry red welt appeared on the woman’s left cheek, and beads of blood were beginning to well up through the reddened skin. “He didn’t want—”
“Don’t fuck with me!” the baron roared, striking her again with the crop, this time with a backhand stroke that put a matching red line on her right cheek.
She shook her head. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes, similar tears of blood leaving red streaks down her cheeks. “He didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay with me. He—”
Fox raised his hand again. “Don’t even think of saying it.”
“—loves me,” she said, her face flush with anger. “He loves me and I love—”
Fox didn’t let her finish. He struck her again and again with the riding crop about the head, neck and shoulders, much harder than before. Her T-shirt shredded and fell from her shoulders, exposing her breasts. Fox slashed at them, too, putting a series of X-like gashes across her chest.
“I don’t want to hear talk like that…ever!” Fox bellowed. He was in the business of making and trading slaves, of selling babies and love wasn’t allowed. Love destroyed everything, as evidenced by this over-the-hill bitch’s romantic notion of living happily ever after. She’d figured that if she didn’t get heavy she’d be able to spend more nights with Wyndam. She was right, of course, but the arrangement could never last long. At her age, five months without getting heavy and her days as a breeder were over. Same for Wyndam. Five months without siring a child, and he’d be on the next slave convoy out of Fox Farm. Then it would be six months to a year working in some mill or refinery and by then it would be time to board the last train west. And all for some triple-stupe notion like love.
The woman lay in a crumpled heap at the baron’s feet. He turned to Bauer, who had stood by impassively while Fox had administered the beating. “Take her to the sec men’s lounge. Tell them they can do what they like with her until the next convoy moves out.”
Bauer nodded. “Any restrictions?”
Fox shook his head. “No, just that if anyone chills her they’ll have to answer to me.”
“And what about Wyndam?”
“Put him in the sec cell overlooking the lounge. Let him watch what happens to lovers on Fox Farm.”
Bauer gave a little smile. “And after she moves out?”
“Give him a beating, then put him back in circulation. But keep an eye on him. He might get difficult.”
Bauer went to the door and summoned a pair of sec men into the room. “Take her to the lounge. And don’t chill her.”
“All right.”
“And while you’re having fun with her, find Jon Wyndam and put him in a cell with a view of the lounge so he gets a good look of his sweetheart in action.”
“Lovers?” the first sec man asked.
Bauer nodded.
“Stupe bastards,” the sec man muttered as he dragged the former breeder out of the office.
When they’d left, Baron Fox adjusted his bathrobe, retied the sash around his waist and sat behind the large oak desk in the center of his office. To his right was a foot-high pile of predark hard-core skin mags that specialized in fetishes, everything from lingerie and leather to bondage and domination. He pulled a mag off the top of the pile and opened it to a familiar pictorial in which a dark-haired woman dressed in a black corselette and stockings had her wrists bound behind her back with a heavy-gauge rope. In some of the pictures she was being whipped by a cat-o’-nine-tails. But while Fox found that exciting enough on its own, it was the spread’s final six photos that really aroused his curiosity. In each of the photos the woman was covered in blue-and-red wax, as if a burning candle had been held over her and allowed to leak hot wax onto her breasts, thighs and buttocks. Fox had wanted to duplicate the scene for months now, but quality candles were as difficult to find as working blasters, especially colored candles. He’d traded his human stock for a decent stockpile of weapons of all types, and was finally confident he had enough firepower to protect his operation from any outside attack. So maybe on the next trade mission to the east he might try to cut a deal for a few colored candles. If not, he could always use molten lead, which, as he thought about it, might even be more interesting than wax.
He replaced the magazine on top of the pile, then looked over at Norman Bauer, who was waiting patiently to be spoken to or dismissed. “What else do you have for me?”
Bauer turned the page of his ledger, but before he could speak, Grundwold, the sec chief, came in through the open door. The man was dressed in dark blue fatigues that were in good condition, and two rows of 12-gauge shells in bandoliers crisscrossed his chest. A Mossberg Persuader 500 shotgun rested in a holster belted to his thigh. It looked to be in remarkable condition.
“What is it?” Fox asked, knowing it would have to be urgent for Grundwold to walk in on him unannounced.
“A scout team spotted a group of seven outlanders approaching from the north, mebbe heading toward the falls,” Grundwold reported.
“Are they armed?”
Grundwold nodded. “Each has a blaster, mebbe more.” He paused a moment, then added, “They look like they know how to use them, too.”
“Women?”
“Two. One black, one white.”
Fox inhaled a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling as he wondered what the best course of action might be. From the sec chief’s report, it sounded as if these outlanders might be better left alone. He’d learned from experience that there was a big difference between scooping up families riding in convoys headed to the eastern villes and taking on seasoned outlanders who had learned to chill attackers on sight. While he’d gained plenty of farmworkers ambushing wag trains, he’d also lost a lot of good sec men to outlanders who preferred death over enslavement.
“Have them followed,” he said. “If there’s an opportunity to take the women, do it.” He waved his hand in the air. “Otherwise, let them go.”
“Yes, sir!” Grundwold turned on his heel and left the office.
“Two new women,” Bauer said, looking over his ledger and likely figuring out what that might do to the farm’s monthly output of offspring.
“Yes,” Fox said, picking up the mag once more and opening it up to his favorite spread. “They’ll make a nice addition to our breeding stock.”
Chapter Three
When they reached the top of the rise, Ryan used the ancient brass telescope he’d found a while back and spotted a ville some distance to the south. There were several tall buildings, and one strange structure looked as if a wag wheel cover had been impaled on a panga.
“Mildred,” Ryan said, “do you recognize that?”
Mildred Wyeth stood by Ryan’s side. “Looks familiar, but a lot of villes had towers like that.”
“Okay. We’ll head for it. Stay alert, people,” Ryan said.
The companions moved on, and at the bottom of the rise they came across a predark road overgrown with weeds. It was still tough going, but easier than walking through dead forests and across weed-covered fields. After a half hour on the road, they came upon fields of flatland dotted with dead trees whose stumps were lined up in neat rows.
“Predark farmland?” Krysty queried as they approached the skeleton of a large glass house that had only a few panes, out of what were once hundreds and hundreds, still unbroken.
“That’d be my guess,” Ryan agreed.
“Orchards,” Doc said. “Apples and pears, it looks like.”
“Acres and acres of prime farmland poisoned by rad dust, and chemical fallout, skydark, nuclear junk….” J.B. said.
“And who knows what else?” Mildred commented.
“The irony is rather precious, isn’t it?” Doc said.
“How mean?” Jak asked.
“These were once magnificent farms, with fresh food as far as the eye could see…but now the muties here think my old and somewhat withered body is a gourmet meal.”
Jak chuckled, but stopped abruptly when there was movement in the ruin of the glass house to their right. The friends stopped in their tracks, all eyes on the glass house looking for another glint of light or shift of shadows.
“J.B., Krysty and Doc, right side. Mildred, Dean and Jak with me. And mind the cross fire.”
Without another word the companions neatly split into two groups and approached the glass house from each side. As Ryan neared, he was able to see through the jagged teeth of the broken panes to the inside of the glass house. Tall green vines grew inside, stretching from the ground to the ceiling, twisting and tangling about as if each vine were trying to choke off the other. Ryan decided that there was nothing else living inside the glass house and what he’d seen was simply the wind twisting its way through the vines. But then he noticed several leaves twitch as if something were slowly moving through the vegetation—close to the ground.
Ryan followed the movement of the vines with his eye, waiting patiently for whatever it was to cross a small clearing to his left. Judging by the thing’s speed, it would be in the open in about two seconds and would be exposed for about half that time. Ryan readied the SIG-Sauer and waited.
When the thing appeared, Ryan held his fire because he wasn’t sure what it was. It looked like a gopher, but it was the size of a large dog. Its back was covered in glass shards embedded in its fur. The glass bits were sharp and jagged, and stuck out from its back at odd angles, making it look like a spike-covered war wag.
Glass or no, it was probably still good eating. Ryan raised the SIG-Sauer, but before he could fire he heard the sound of one of Jak’s leaf-bladed knives slicing through the air and vines. A moment later the knife pierced the side of the animal. The creature gave a small yelp before falling onto its side, dead.
“Supper time!” Jak shouted.
“No,” Ryan called, turning to see the albino already crawling through one of the glass house’s empty frames. Ryan reached out with his hand to try to stop him, but was too late. As soon as Jak was inside the glass house, a vine wrapped itself around his leg, holding him in place long enough for other vines to entwine his legs, arms and neck. The vines were a species of tanglers, and vicious ones at that. They’d left the gopher alone because the sharp glass in its skin made the thing too tough to chill. Jak, on the other hand, was an easy meal. His vest, with its shards of glass and pieces of jagged metal, wouldn’t protect him.
Jak was struggling to get at another of his knives, but the vines had already gotten hold of his arms. He opened his mouth to call for help, but a thick green vine slid between his lips, choking off his words.
Ryan holstered the SIG-Sauer and unsheathed his panga. After kicking in the metal framing in front of him, he stepped into the glass house and began hacking at the vines. They were tough, as thick as rope in places, each one requiring several hard chops with the big knife to cut through. When he reached the tangle of vines covering Jak, the albino was still struggling fiercely against the mutant vegetation. Wasting no time, Ryan began with the vines around Jak’s head, but before he could cut through anything, a vine wrapped around Ryan’s wrist, making his swings too weak to be effective.
He switched the panga to his left hand and used it to cut his right arm free of the vine. He had the panga back in his right hand and was again working on freeing Jak when another vine got hold of his right leg and pulled him off balance. The sudden movement changed the arc of Ryan’s knife, and he came dangerously close to lopping off Jak’s right ear. Luckily the panga cut through the vines wrapped around the albino’s neck and mouth, allowing Jak to draw in a much needed breath.
But now there were vines around both Ryan’s legs. He could cut himself free, but by the time he did that, Jak might be dead. He left the vines around his legs for the time being and concentrated on freeing Jak. Vines moved into place around his neck and head again, and Jak struggled for breath. Ryan cleared away the new vines from around his neck, but they now had him by the chest, as well, squeezing him hard and making it difficult for Jak to inhale.
“Ryan! Jak!” J.B. called.
“Over here,” Ryan responded.
In moments Ryan heard the sound of J.B.’s Tekna and Doc’s swordstick slashing through the vines.
Ryan doubled his efforts and began cutting and hacking at the vines around him. When he was free, he turned to Jak, who was now on the verge of losing consciousness. Ryan swung the panga over Jak’s head in a wide arc, and the vines stretching from the ceiling fell away like rope. As he began working on Jak’s left side, he could see J.B. and Doc approaching through the thinning wall of vines. They had cut a swath through the deadly vegetation and were now close enough to keep the vines away from Ryan as he continued working to free Jak.
